Keanu Reeves and Martin Scorsese in 'Side by Side'

Have you ever wondered what your favorite director thought about shooting on digital film? How about actress Greta Gerwig? Have you even considered what the indie actress thought the first time she heard the whirring sound of an actual celluloid camera? What of cinematographers and colorists—how interested are you in exploring their relationships? (Are they adversaries? Do they work as a team? Did they start out adversaries, but thanks to advances in technology, now work as a team?) Have you ever wondered how Keanu Reeves would sound saying such profound phrases as “film has helped us share our experiences and dreams,” or “by the 1980s, Avid had developed digital editing into a cost-effective, computer-based system”?

If the answer to any of the above is “yes—but only if fed to me through a 90-minute documentary”—then you are exactly the niche audience longtime production manager and part-time documentarian Chris Kenneally had in mind for his second feature-length film, Side by Side.

Perhaps that sounds unduly negative. After all, there are many out there for whom portions, at least, of this documentary about the rise of digital film in cinema may be of interest. Side by Side manages the tough task of being an instructive look into the way technology has developed over the years while also being occasionally entertaining. There is a intriguing question prevalent in the movie—which taps the likes of Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, James Cameron, George Lucas and David Fincher, as well as the special effects guy for Jurassic Park, for answers (and yet, for some ungodly reason, chose Keanu Reeves as its narrator)—one that can be summarized somewhat neatly: Are we at the end of film?

Unfortunately for the producers, that doesn’t take too long to answer. The only people who even try to argue against the relentless march of technology do so purely on an aesthetic basis. Digital film lets you shoot longer, and for less money. It is easier and cheaper to edit. It is better for the planet. The end. As Ms. Gerwig puts it, “They process digital now to make it look like film, as if film is inherently better. Just, we like the way it looks better. Which seems kind of arbitrary, because it’s just what we’re used to.”

Surprisingly, the film chooses independent cinematographers (Reed Morano and Bradford Young) to defend the more expensive, older technology, as if the idea of film reels is now so antiquated that the only people who use them do so specifically so they can talk about how it “feels different.” Hipsters, basically. The film barely acknowledges that most films are still mainly shot on celluloid, with digital cameras filling in occasionally.

With 80 minutes left to fill, Mr. Reeves is left to ask more questions about, you know, movie stuff. Judging from the answers given, the questions range from “Do you remember back when you had ‘dailies’ and had to edit movies by hand?” to “Did Robert Downey Jr. ever pee in jars and leave them around your set as a form of protest?”

It’s not that the answers aren’t interesting: Mr. Lynch, whose last film, Inland Empire, was shot entirely digitally, claims that he will never return to celluloid. Some like Mr. Fincher, on the other hand, recognize that digital film can lead to terrible-looking movies—though he rightly puts the blame on the people who make them, not what equipment they are shot on. And Danny Boyle is perhaps the best example of how an early adopter can turn a public’s interest and make something like digital film mainstream. After watching a Dogme 95 film called The Celebration, which was shot entirely on a Sony Handycam, the director tracked down the film’s cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle. The result was 28 Days Later, portions of which were shot with digital cameras. In 2009, their film Slumdog Millionaire became the first movie shot predominantly in a digital format to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Mr. Cameron and Mr. Lucas, meanwhile, are super-jazzed to talk—at length and ad nauseam—about every minutiae of digital editing and special effects. This would be less irritating if they weren’t busy taking credit for everything short of inventing the digital camera itself. Actually, Mr. Lucas comes close, boasting about how his company created the analog computer editing system EditDroid, and the next thing you know, he’s referring to the game-changing digital editor Avid as a “we” endeavor. It would have been good to take note here that EditDroid was a commercial failure and was sold to Avid in 1993 after the Star Wars remakes. Only 24 ED systems were ever made.

Frankly, the movie has too much time on its hands: it spends an exorbitant amount of it talking to colorists, special effects animators, editors and various other people with jobs that you’d only care to hear about if you were really really interested in how films are made. And when someone appears whose only movie credit is the new Joseph Gordon-Levitt feature Premium Rush, you have to wonder what he is doing sharing screen time with Mr. Scorcese.

Finally, in a movie that gets into the nitty-gritty of editing and special effects, you would think the glaring continuity error of Mr. Reeves’s hair length would have been noticed and fixed in post. (It goes from very short, with stubbly beard to very long, with neckbeard, before going short again, then long again, etc. It’s quite distracting.)

But let us not nitpick. It’s doubtful that anyone will leave this movie siding with the celluloid purists, believing that the digital process will be the end film as we know it. Auteurs will continue to shoot in whichever medium they prefer, and there will always be hundreds of forgettable flicks for every great one, no matter what technology is employed—a lesson Side by Side proves simply by existing.

SIDE BY SIDE

Two stars out of four
Running Time 99 Minutes
Directed by Chris Kenneally
Starring: Keanu Reeves, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron,
Robert Rodriguez, Walter Murch and David Fincher

Fisher, Dunst, and Caplan in "Bachelorette"

Bachelorette’s mere existence is a success story, regardless of the film’s quality. Leslye Headland adapted her Off Broadway play—about a trio of women and their ambivalence about and debauchery during the wedding of a loathed frenemy—for the screen and got a few high-wattage stars on board; the movie, first released online rather than gradually in limited release, has already hit number one on the iTunes rental platform. (It comes out in theaters here September 7.)

And Bachelorette, with its alienation of the audience—this film depicts its characters behaving very, very badly toward one another—is a tough sell. But it justifies its existence, if barely. It’s quite possible that this film owes much to the success of last year’s wedding blockbuster Bridesmaids, but the two could not be more divergent. It may have taken a zeitgeist-y, sexy pitch to get this movie onto the hard drives of iTunes users, but so be it: it’s among the edgiest and most daring American comedies in years, if one that occasionally tips too far into miserabilism.

Kirsten Dunst, who’s made a dandy second career in small and daring roles and who ought never to go back to dumb studio fare, plays the near-protagonist, Regan, the maid of honor. Regan begins the film bragging to Becky (Rebel Wilson) about how she’s been working with young cancer victims, beaming the whole while—this is a completely competent woman, we’re meant to learn, with a heart of obsidian. (They’re getting lunch, and Regan orders a Cobb salad with all the elements of a Cobb salad on the side, pushing the joke into the realm of the obvious, as often happens in this movie.) Becky, the one completely good-hearted member of the ensemble, announces her engagement, which prompts a remarkable comic flicker of revulsion across Regan’s face, before cutting to a three-way call (still?) between Regan and the other two bridesmaids, the trio the story will choose to follow.

The rest of the film takes place on the night before Becky’s wedding, as Katie (Isla Fisher) and Gena (a remarkable Lizzy Caplan) join Regan for a bachelorette party that quickly devolves to include only the three of them. The cocaine comes not in bags but, it would seem, in buckets; that the three girls would end up trying on Becky’s oversized wedding dress (which fits two of the slender bridesmaids), tearing it open in the process, only makes sense here.

Little in the following minutes makes perfect sense, though, and the film has the theatrical-adaptation curse of sticking to a very strict through-line at the expense of spontaneity or realism. Why must our three bachelorettes crash the groom’s bachelor party? Onstage, it’s to create more drama in a limited space, to move on to the next scene. On film, weird and unconvincing explanations are thrust at the viewer, but, frankly, it doesn’t matter: Ms. Dunst and Ms. Caplan carry their characters so well that the audience is willing to go down avenues that otherwise seem inexplicable.

Ms. Dunst is utterly fantastic—after a wildly different performance as a depressive bride in Melancholia—playing a maid of honor sublimating her anger and belief that she cannot be loved. She elevates the film past any memory of the more traditional wedding movies of the past—the horrific Bride Wars and The Wedding Planner, or even the superlative but very sunny Bridesmaids—by creating a character who feels drawn from life, even in all her rage. Ms. Caplan’s character comes less from life and more from filmic cliché: she’s the burnout friend who sleeps with one too many unsuitable men out of a nihilistic impulse emerging from the screenwriter’s chic boredom. But Ms. Caplan’s sheer charisma moves the part out of the realm of the sad best friend. The same cannot be said of Isla Fisher’s performance, though. Her role as an irresponsible dumb-bunny is the thinnest in the movie, and her work in the film has not even a hint of intelligence behind the eyes. I’m fairly certain she mispronounced the name of her workplace, “Club Monaco.” And if it was a joke, it was too nasty to land.

In any case, Ms. Dunst and Ms. Caplan power through the middle part of the movie, a section of sheer contrivance, to arrive, suddenly, at a bravura finale. Perhaps their unjustified detour to a strip club mirrors a bad night spent drunk and high; nothing is meant to make sense, really. Once the three sober up and begin to deal with all the previous night’s damages (that dress is still torn apart), the movie suddenly comes together as more than just a pair of good performances and some classy zingers. There’s genuine tension inherent in the struggle to get Becky’s dress fixed on time.

And that tension wouldn’t exist if the movie were in fact what it proclaims itself to be, from its opening credits of the protagonists’ yearbook photos with slurs scrawled across them to the bridesmaids’ calling the bride “Pig Face” to all those drugs and all that vomit: the bachelorettes are neurotic not because they’re angry messes, as they keep declaring, but because they love Becky and they’re scared for their own futures, all at once. If they can’t get the dress to her on time, what hope is there for them? It’s a question fraught with annoying prejudices—being a bride, or a good bridesmaid, is not at the center of being a woman, as women are told by popular culture—that are nevertheless key to American women’s lives.

By its end, the messy Bachelorette isn’t just a good counterbalance to all those bad wedding movies—or the good one that ends with a Wilson Phillips sing-along. It’s a way for any truly flawed viewer (which is to say any viewer, or at least any New York viewer) to stand vicariously at the center of a nasty, but honestly nasty, set of nuptials.

Bachelorette

Running Time 91 Minutes

Written and Directed by Leslye Headland

Starring Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan

Three out of four stars

Somewhere Between

The film is clearly a labor of love for Ms. Goldstein Knowlton, and her passion for the subject shows in the amount of time she grants her young subjects, Ann, Fang, Haley and Jenna. These girls hail from across the U.S., have different family situations and possess different degrees of interest in their birth families—and often the girls’ experiences are interesting and moving in and of themselves.

However, given the lack of narration on the subject of adoption from more seasoned or knowledgeable voices, the film places viewers too intimately into the lives of these girls. Cruel nicknames like “banana” and “Twinkie” (both, you see, are yellow on the outside but white on the inside) are tossed around casually by the adoptees. It would hardly have squelched the vérité feel of the film to insert some sort of expert speaking, generally, to the experiences and challenges that adopted children from China face in America, as well as reasons for the relative popularity of Chinese adoption. Personal experience is anecdotal, and some of the experiences in this film feel as though they were included not for insight but to pad the running time, as when Ann, on vacation with her family, notes, “I’m happy with my parents,” and paddles off in a kayak. Happy story; inert as drama.

The girls in this film have broadly similar trajectories with incidental differences: all, to some degree, accept that their placement in the U.S. was a fortunate occurrence and resolve any lingering doubts. The most revealing scene in the film may be a conference of adopted girls in London, where British adoptees blithely laugh over the impossibility of finding their birth parents. Given that a couple of the film’s subjects are apathetic about finding their origins, and none of them seem ill-adjusted, what exactly is the story here? One would never call a life uninteresting, but some stories simply lack the dramatic tension to deserve the screen treatment—what is the takeaway from the subject whose journey in the film ends with her deciding to take up yoga to be a little calmer?

And the parts of the film that are traditionally “interesting” feel incredibly invasive, as is the case with Haley, who finds her birth family in China. The scenes leading up to this discovery are poorly directed and uncomfortable—upon returning to her place of origin, Haley is approached by a group of Chinese citizens who speak among themselves in un-subtitled Chinese. She’s immediately told that she resembles a local family, and the next thing we know, Haley is in a shaky, grainy, hand-held camera shot, announcing, “That’s my sister over there—maybe.” Another scene that feels inappropriate is one in which Ann reads an emotional, personal account at a conference in Europe of her anxieties as an adoptee. Both Haley and Ann lack the words to convey their experiences in a manner understandable to outsiders and are left in tears; it doesn’t help that the experiences, along with Fang’s trip to a Chinese orphanage to learn more about herself, are “cinematic” moments in a string of quotidian interviews, such that the narrative grows near-unbelievable. It’s not necessarily too intimate for the cameras to be recording, but the intimacy has to be earned; too often, Somewhere Between teaches the complexity of adoption without granting real understanding of the experience.

Teenagers are not ideal chroniclers of their own lives despite their garrulousness, and these teens are no exception: the subjects speak in circuitous, vaguely uplifting terms about their experiences. We are able to read between the lines as to their challenges without over-explication, but, even leaving aside the lack of expert testimony about the subject of adoption, there ought to be more scenes like the one in a Tennessee beauty shop in which a woman seems perplexed by the fact that Haley’s younger sister, also Chinese, is adopted. (Haley’s mother, for reference, is white.) These, more than the rare trips to China and the international conferences, are the daily experiences that the camera ought to have caught more of—these are the challenges that adoptees from China, and the director’s daughter, will face.

Running Time 94 minutes

Directed By Linda Goldstein Knowlton

Starring Haley, Jenna, Ann and Fang

Two and a half out of four stars

Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain

Lawless begins with the shooting death of a pig, a scene that perfectly encapsulates the film’s tone: cruel and strange. The shooting is free of context aside from one child spurring another on to pull the trigger while the pig writhes in its pen, sensing danger in the air. The film never returns to the children, showing them instead as men who’ve committed to an unrepentant violence they spent their childhoods teasing, but that act hangs over the movie—a tale of captive pigs and the impetuous children who seek to slay them.

The kids grow up to be the Bondurant brothers, played by Jason Clarke, Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf. Mr. LaBeouf’s character, Jack Bondurant, is a dopey innocent, fetishizing the deeds of crime kingpin Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman). Jack sees crime activity as some sort of lark—he sneaks bullet casings from the scene of one of Banner’s killings—whereas his brother Forrest (Mr. Hardy) sees it as a grim necessity. Forrest, in turn, is seen as “immortal” in his small town, and not just because his brass knuckles assist him in savage, gruesome pummelings. With his glum growl of resignation after each beating of a would-be killer, he makes clear that there’s no childlike pleasure here. He’s simply choosing not to die. This performance by Mr. Hardy is the best the actor has turned in yet: the Brit, whose physical transformations over the past few years have been misconstrued as acting, is here a solid wall of flesh, but with the taciturn grimness to match.

The brothers make their name through more than just pugilism: they run moonshine in a Virginia county that’s said to be “the wettest in the world.” The encroachment of law enforcement near the start of the film hardly holds them back, but it does give them a new evil to contend with. Where Forrest sees killing as part of the job—something to be endured—the new-in-town Special Agent Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce) craves it. Where Forrest is a simple country gent in raggedy togs, Charlie is a preening peacock in shades of black, with slicked coal-black hair and shaved eyebrows. He’s a great villain for a film that spins the conventional G-men-versus-outlaws tale into an exploration of the oddity of American history, the manner in which our provincialism and our peculiarities define our story as a nation and as an often-ragged assemblage of communities.

As a tale of criminals facing down law enforcement, Lawless resembles Prohibition movies like The Untouchables far less than it does something like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Like the ambiguous and haunting Assassination, Lawless spins an archetypal story of American history in new directions, both morally and aesthetically. Morally, the film takes a strong stand on the side of the bootleggers, entrepreneurial types trying to make their way in an environment where law enforcement is a greater threat than even one’s rival moonshiner. (Mr. LaBeouf’s romanticization of a life in crime is played, before a final rebuke, for laughs—somewhere along the way he fills a car’s gas tank with moonshine to make it run.) The locals in this film stand together in quiet awe of Floyd Banner and utter disdain for Charlie Rakes, the outsider whose very presence upsets the balance of the small town’s life. Lawless is a story of a specific upside-down time in America when the law of the land was far less important than tribal custom. But perhaps it isn’t that specific—after all, director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave are Australian, and recent American politics have shown the deep resentment that communities harbor when faced with the perceived incursion of the state.

Aesthetically, the film is beautiful, and not merely for the conventional shots of Appalachia that appear at the beginning. (Mr. Hillcoat has improved greatly as a director since the turgid, poorly paced The Road, but he still loves an establishing shot.) Lawless’s fascination comes from the cartoonishness its characters assume in order to sell their roles. Rakes is some sort of dark raven, first seen leaning against a black limousine, with an accent residing somewhere between Chicago and Austria. Mr. Oldman is first seen clutching a gun as lightly as he would an umbrella, then bracing it against himself with both arms, and then raising it high above his car as he speeds away. Between that and his languorously smoked cigarettes, he’s more appendage than man. Mr. LaBeouf’s childish mien—even at 26, he’s still not quite a man—makes him the most peculiar-looking bootlegger you’ve ever seen, and yet it works for the movie. (His adequate acting suits the movie slightly less.) And an injury that befalls Forrest midway through the film leaves him with scars out of an old Lon Chaney monster movie: graphic reminders of the toll that the incursion of state can place upon pastoral life.

The film’s ultimate merger of moral ambiguity and aesthetic vision comes in the form of Jessica Chastain, the prolific actress whose stunning looks have rarely been used to such good effect as here. Ms. Chastain—fair-skinned, red-headed, with the body of a studio-system starlet—plays a woman of dubious morality. She, too, has come to the country from the city, and she brings trouble, the bad reputation she’s been trying to escape catching up with her. She’s utterly compelling as a woman caught between a desired future that seems at best unlikely—one spent with Forrest, who is reduced to silence upon first seeing her—and a past that just keeps coming back. The county can neither tolerate Chicago law enforcement nor Chicago loose women—it’s a closed system. Ms. Chastain’s character, Maggie, who pulls a knife on an assailant and quietly manipulates an unemotional Forrest into loving her, would be the femme fatale of a film noir, the dangerous woman with a heart of gold.

In a film like this, though, Maggie, the girl with the dark past and the half-burnt cigarette and the bright-red nails, cannot be allowed to have motives less than pure. Nor, for that matter, can the community fail to band together. Lawless’s locals represent an optimistic story about the best of America in the face of grinding opposition and violent conflagration; whether that story is true or false is up for debate, but if the movie’s denouement has a wish-fulfillment quality, the tacked-on coda rots out the teeth with sweetness. A film that delved into Prohibition ends with Morning in America. The pig has been forgotten, though certain characters are penned up very comfortably.

It’s of little matter. For all the corruption of Jack’s innocence throughout the film, the restoration of said innocence seems a fitting enough conclusion. Whether or not one believes the story to be credible, its implicit, perhaps unintended moral—that certain lessons need to be learned over and over, even when it seems you’ve escaped the cruelty of your past—is certainly one that bears telling.

Running Time 115 minutes

Written By Nick Cave and Matt Bondurant (novel)

Directed By John Hillcoat

Starring Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf and Jessica Chastain

Three and a half out of four stars

Marion Cotillard.

Fans of The Artist’s Oscar-winning star Jean Dujardin will be delighted to see that he can do caddish modern-day egotist as well as he does caddish silent-film-era egotist. In the opening scene of Little White Lies, the camera tracks Mr. Dujardin, as Ludo, through a club as he looks for cocaine, brusquely propositions girls, dances like an ape to outdated pop music and finally hops on a motorcycle. The camera trails from a respectable distance—the perfect distance to capture Ludo’s motorcycle getting hit by an oncoming truck.

Little White Lies, with its first cut, becomes a radically different film than it might have been: the story of a Parisian rake becomes the tale of a group of friends banding together in the face of mortality. However, they’re not supporting the hospitalized Ludo; they’re going on a pre-planned vacation that was originally set to include an able-bodied Ludo. Though he can’t make it, a sense of foreboding manages to join them on the trip.

Among the vacationers are host Max (François Cluzet), who is obsessive about the quality of his summer home, destroying walls in the hunt for weasels, and Vincent (Benoît Magimel), who’s not gay—really! He just really, really loves Max. And has confessed to him. And the two have mutually decided to get past it. Meanwhile, Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) is so obsessed with the texts his ex is sending him that he drives a motorboat onto dry land, while Marie (Marion Cotillard), Ludo’s former girlfriend, feels regret over leaving Ludo’s bedside and a palpable boredom with her old routine of seducing that she can’t help but keep enacting.

If this sounds like a strange mélange of comedy and drama, well, it is, in precisely the manner of The Big Chill, the new classic that Little White Lies emulates down to its soundtrack of American pop and rock standards. The characters are purposefully distracting themselves from aging and death by discrediting the louche persona of the absent Ludo, whose vices have made him the first of the gang to suffer major misfortune. And yet their distractions lend the film its humor, as the viewers’ attentions, along with the characters’, drift far from his hospital room. The performances and, in turn, the on-screen relationships indicate the sort of chemistry only a group of longtime friends can share.

Yet the diversions of the group are indulged for far too long. Like a real vacation, Little White Lies goes from fun to exhausting around the halfway mark, as certain scenes drag on. Why are we spending movie minutes watching the gang frolic in the water to Creedence Clearwater Revival? And why, when the water sports get too vicious and lead to a breakdown that has Marie screaming at her friends, does the camera cut away just as she’s reaching high dudgeon? The only consequence is that Marie gets revenge—we suppose it’s “revenge”—by spraying one of her tormentors with whipped cream. It’s not that the film is too long, necessarily. It’s that director Guillaume Canet (Ms. Cotillard’s real-life partner) is too much a member of the group, seeking to convey minor incident at length while pushing major developments onto the back burner—often presented mute with a pop soundtrack overlay. The actors deserve better.

And when they’re given the space to really act, the cast works wonders. Ms. Cotillard, who has struggled in English-language films despite having been given opportunities to work with practically ever major filmmaker in America and Europe, feels here like a newcomer, or perhaps a comeback artist. The dull Christopher Nolan days are forgotten. Rather than playing some outsized femme fatale or object of desire, Ms. Cotillard nails the role of a woman afraid of her own future, and haunted by her past. Mr. Magimel does his part as well, in the story line in which Mr. Canet’s refusal to commit fully to high drama actually succeeds: we never get a full sense of how or why Vincent realized he was in love with his best male friend, and there’s no tiresome exposition. The film, in this case, seems like the best part of hanging out with longtime friends—information just bubbles from the ether, its origin forgotten.

By the time the film ends, the characters have all reckoned with their selfishness—and their apparent lightheartedness, and seemingly ironic fun, throughout seem almost savagely insouciant. The movie justifies, in some sense, its focus on the fun that Marie, Max and company have had when it finally indicts them for their cruelty to Ludo. While it takes some work and attentiveness to get to this point, the film’s evolution into a critique of 30-something self-absorption makes it a small-scale success.

LITTLE WHITE LIES

Running Time 154 minutes

Written and Directed by Guillaume Canet

Starring François Cluzet, Marion Cotillard and Benoît Magimel

Three out of four stars

After their masterful treatment of the human capacity for wonder and sympathy in the animated film Persepolis, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi have returned, but you’ll wish they’d left well enough alone. Chicken With Plums travels back and forward in time from its central plot: a musician having decided to die—leaving his wife a widow and his children orphans—because his violin is broken. The future holds nothing but grimness, even though it’s completely incongruous. (Why would a scholar and revolutionary immediately adopt the most garish trappings of capitalism? Why do these talented directors think a Todd Solondz parody still has bite?) The past holds nothing but lame explications for the protagonist’s inexcusable behavior. And the bizarre thing? The filmmakers think their story is a whimsical stroll, not a journey to the heart of darkness.

The best fiction in any medium often features the sort of protagonist one cannot wholeheartedly support—the antihero—and seeks to understand his or her behavior. Chicken With Plums, though, seeks to excuse. It’s O.K. that he has completely abandoned his family, see, because he’s sad his violin is broken. And why is that violin broken? Well, because he called his wife, the family’s major breadwinner, “a shitty little teacher.” And he said that because he lost his first love, and married his wife out of sheer pique.

To present this behavior as a slice of life is one thing. To dub it over with a saccharine, tedious score, overlay it with animated birds and mystical characters that appear and disappear at will, and then end the film with a sequence explaining that the protagonist was a really wonderful violinist, indicates that either the writers/directors don’t understand their main character’s brutality and the effect it has on the audience, or that they simply don’t care. Any cultural explanation—that midcentury Iran might somehow be different from continental Europe in the 1700s or a space station orbiting the Earth in the year 3000—is elided. All the marvelous specificity of place in Persepolis has been sacrificed to the monolith of individual narcissism that the filmmakers endlessly flatter.

The central performance, at least, is very good. Mathieu Amalric, as Nasser-Ali, the violinist whose talent comes at great expense, nails puppyish love, disillusionment and bitterness; his eyes bug out further, somehow, than they ever have before. (He resembles a soulful Steve Buscemi.) Were this a character study told with fewer fantastical flourishes, this would be an entirely different story. That story would be miserablist—life is not kind to Nasser-Ali—but it would not burnish the legend of a man whose inattentiveness dooms his children and his wife. Ms. Satrapi and Mr. Parronaud seem to think that their flash-forwards have some wicked black humor (see: the cutaway to a fantasy America of obese, pregnant teens, lit in candy colors). All it really is is bleakness elbowing your ribs. By the time Death incarnate comes to giggle away and tell the familiar “appointment in Samarra” story (via a cutesy, hypercolor animated sequence), all hopes that real consequences might exist in the Chicken With Plums universe have vanished.

This review is hardly a moral objection to the actions Nasser-Ali takes in Chicken With Plums, though they are reprehensible. But it is a critique of the manner in which those decisions are presented—as lacking gravity. Nasser-Ali is unforgivably cruel to his wife, who is played almost too well by Maria de Medeiros: the viewer is granted no catharsis, just the explanation that she could never satisfy the mercurial artist’s craving for a lost sweetheart. Fine, but why must we watch her endlessly degrade herself to claim just a modicum of love? And sure, his children were doomed by Nasser-Ali’s negligence even before his death (the one who doesn’t move to America dies young, of a heart attack). But is the lesson learned that if we toss on enough sweet music and a flashback at the end, the future has an unbearable lightness?

Chicken With Plums does have much to recommend it to those viewers who are able to disconnect from the consequence-free universe the directors have constructed. The cinematography is unusually beautiful, depicting Tehran as a sort of idealized land beyond time and place (perhaps accounting for the lack of specificity). Ms. de Medeiros’s portrait of a woman riven by grief for a husband who has not yet even died is fantastic. Yet every rose in this film comes with a poison-tipped thorn. For instance, the beautiful cinematography is used to sporadically indulge every childish notion, like incarnating Nasser-Ali’s dead mother in a puff of cigarette smoke. And Ms. de Medeiros’s portrayal of her character’s low self-esteem makes it easy for the filmmakers, too, to disregard her.

In privileging the story of Nasser-Ali’s brief lost love as the key to his story, and casting every other component as a bagatelle whose existence means nothing, the directors have frustratingly ignored the humanism of Persepolis in favor of the cult of the genius. Music, like Nasser-Ali’s performances, fades on the air as soon as the note is struck: cruelty to people resonates through the generations, and cruelty to characters is preserved on film eternally. These filmmakers have the ratio reversed.

Chicken With Plums
Running Time 93 Minutes
Written and Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi
Starring Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros, Golshifteh Farahani

* out of ****

That’s why Beloved, the story of a mother and daughter’s journey through the 20th century and much of the Western Hemisphere, gets the benefit of the doubt for its first hour or so. The French musical features a cast of innate charm but no great melodic skill—at least, none that the audience is privy to, as the pop songs wouldn’t strain even the most untrained vocal chords. The songs in Beloved come so infrequently that it’s barely a musical—more like a relationship drama with occasional songs of either jubilation or lament (no in-between). The songs arise suddenly and, as quickly, drop off. And lyrically, they’re not exactly Sondheim. As translated in subtitles, characters sing lines like “London calling, but who I can’t say”; “Remember the ring you put on my finger?”; “Is this Oxford Street? Or my sadness and grief?”

The confectionery-sweet ditties add a sense of whimsy at first, but as the clock ticks on, the viewer begins to get frustrated; the plot of the film, shifting as it does from comedy to tragedy on a dime, is so lugubrious, so overdetermined, that the songs can’t possibly move the narrative forward. (Nor are they imaginatively shot. Sequence after sequence the camera tracks backward down an alley, keeping pace with a character walking in the same direction.)

Writer/director Christopher Honoré has inverted the movie-musical formula—while the songs are pleasurable to listen to, they’re not so much so that they prevent the audience from hankering for the final chord so that the plot may commence once more. And Beloved’s a real potboiler: Madeleine, a young prostitute, played by Ludivine Sagnier, gets impregnated, then grows up to be Catherine Deneuve. (She’s thus the luckiest working girl on her side of the Seine.) The gent floats in and out (young, he’s played by Radivoje Bukvic; old, he’s Milos Forman). The daughter grows up to be a neurasthenic Parisian.

Chiara Mastroianni makes a strong impression as Véra, the daughter who grows up, amid sometimes decade-long temporal leaps forward, to be self-dramatizing and monomaniacal in her pursuit of love (all too often amour fou). While Ms. Deneuve’s character borrows from the legendary actress’s own cool reserve, Ms. Mastroianni gnashes her teeth as much as the quirky French pop musical will allow.

That Ms. Mastroianni is Ms. Deneuve’s real-life daughter may explain the pair’s chemistry despite their characters’ diametrically opposed positions on love. “I don’t suggest you fall in love,” says Ms. Deneuve’s character at one point. “The rest may be fun.” And yet Ms. Mastroianni pursues an unattainable man (the charming American actor Paul Schneider), whose homosexuality makes their arguments about why he ought to love her seem not only interminable, but vaguely offensive. “You realize I got the idea that you loved me,” says a heterosexual woman to a gay man. “But I’m not bitter.” Instead, she simply redoubles her efforts in a manner that isn’t allowed to be read as deranged but rather as passionate—the object of affection is, within this narrative, a problem to be solved.

This movie thus operates according to a sort of dream-logic. The songs, which happen at such random intervals that they always take the viewer by surprise, are in some ways the least surreal part of Beloved, a film that jumps forward in time with little warning, addressing the sweep of history as though it were a dark subplot easy to ignore. The terrorist attack of September 11, for instance, is something that merely happens to Véra, diverting a flight to Montreal and delaying a romantic reunion with her gay beloved. The Soviet tanks pulling into Prague provide a great opportunity for the young Madeleine to skip town, but, never fear, her husband will roll into Paris to dance with her in a pool hall out of some Damon Runyon story.

Why bother moving from Prague to Paris to London with nothing to say about the changes the 20th century wrought on any of those places? Without a doubt, the film is more interested in the changes in romance over time than in any sociological or historical change. But it feels pointless to jump from one time and place to the next with the only notable difference being Madeleine and Véra’s respective descents into cynicism and mad disillusionment, especially given how opaque Madeleine’s character is.

While Catherine Deneuve’s chic untouchability has justly made her a screen icon, it works against her role here; her extreme sangfroid is either an example of the divide between American and French outlooks or, more likely, an emphasis of style over substance. Even by the standards of this film, her singing is arid, emotionally detached. Each wry aphorism Madeleine directs at her distraught daughter feels like yet another iteration of the altered reality Mr. Honoré’s characters inhabit—and in a film of over two hours, is it too much to ask that the façade might crack a little bit? When Ms. Deneuve finally shows an emotion, it feels like much too little and hours too late. The film vacillates between the extremes of seen-it-all pessimism and manic pursuit, between songs of pure devotion and lamentation. Like being in love, its hairpin shifts in tone can be compelling; unlike the best musicals, it fails to stir the heart moment to moment.

Beloved
Running Time 145 Minutes
Written and Directed by Christophe Honoré
Starring Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Ludivine Sagnier

** 1/2 out of ****

Jones and Samberg

It’s easy to be down on “alternative” —or independent—romantic comedies. Lower-budget boy-meets-girl movies seem even more moribund than more conventional entries in the genre these days, with offerings like Lola Versus and (500) Days of Summer aping Hollywood conventions, adding little to the well-oiled machine but a vague sense of quirk. The notion that they’re telling a new or different sort of story is belied by the same familiar beats and characters and tropes audiences have become familiar with through your run-of-the-mill blockbuster.

Celeste and Jesse Forever, however, announces itself as a genuine alternative to the mainstream romantic comedy and for once doesn’t play the part in name only. It’ll restore your faith that there’s something new to say about love on screen—or, at least, a new way to say it.

The film’s opening sequence introduces the audience to a couple (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, playing Celeste and Jesse) who have fallen in and out of romantic love. They are still together but clearly disillusioned, separated and preparing for divorce—but still sharing a platonic affection.

Celeste is a high-powered author and trend-spotting PR agent of sorts (what it is she does all day remains vague throughout the movie, and is a failure of the film, but more on this later), while Jesse is a layabout illustrator who prefers watching old VHS tapes of the Olympics to making money. Their divergent ambitions have pulled the couple apart; it’s possible to have known someone for a very long time and yet still have rushed into marriage. They’re rushing into divorce, too—Jesse hasn’t even moved out as he prepares to sign the paperwork.

What makes Celeste and Jesse Forever bold is its view of what happens after the end of a romance. Romantic comedies often view long-term relationships as the end goal—comedies since Shakespeare have ended with a marriage, but contemporary heroines have pursued it so aggressively and single-mindedly that the head spins. In other words, the long-term relationship is so obviously wrong that it is an obstacle to be cleared so that true love, with the female half’s cute neighbor or the friend she’s always ignored, may reign.

Celeste and Jesse’s relationship, as seen through a montage of still photographs, was neither perfect nor horrid. Like a real relationship, it had component parts that were very positive and very negative, drawn out over the course of the film through the pair’s completely natural interactions with one another. Ms. Jones and Mr. Samberg have an enviable chemistry that threatens at any time to burst into a screaming fight or into a rekindling of affection. And their relationship, like any real relationship, proves remarkably difficult to end definitively.

Nothing about the interactions between Celeste and Jesse seems schematic, a credit to a script that puts them through a number of twists that might seem contrived. But Celeste’s reactions in particular are unpredictable in the way that people are unpredictable (co-writer Rashida Jones gave herself, after years of being improperly utilized on NBC sitcoms, a great character); nothing in this film seems as though it came from a screenwriting handbook.

It is difficult in the age of spoilers to discuss this film without going into vagaries of the sort indulged above; that’s because the standout element of the film, the relationship as written, relies on the shock of the real, the consistent depiction of the option that Celeste or Jesse, fully realized characters, might choose against the best interest of themselves or of a tidy narrative. It’s so unlike other movies of its ilk that to specifically delineate the hows and whys is to spoil its effect.

Other elements of the film are less effective: the script falters in its attempt to parody contemporary culture through Celeste’s job and through a Britney-circa-1999-ish starlet she promotes, or mentors, or something. Lee Toland Krieger’s direction is at times naturalistic to a fault; scenes can be poorly lit. Certain characters—Ari Graynor’s well-drawn confidante or Elijah Wood’s against-type boss—fall through the cracks in ways that feel true to Celeste and Jesse’s narcissistic pursuit of happiness but don’t give the characters enough to do. Were they not able to make such good use of their limited screen time, they’d be the traditional boring best friends and confessors every romantic comedy is stocked with.

And Celeste and Jesse are narcissistic and self-involved; but that’s the point. Rather than bravely soldiering on to the next great love, as any hero or heroine who dumps the wrong partner at the start of a movie ought to do, they both end up in entanglements. Their respective greatest loves are not one another but the idea of “Celeste and Jesse”—they clearly don’t fit together, and we aren’t rooting for them to make it. Celeste and Jesse Forever, then, is ultimately a film that flies in the face of the notion underpinning most of modern cinema, that conventionally perfect love is possible.

Love, in this film, is conditional, compromised, the end result of a series of often wrongheaded decisions. What becomes of Celeste and Jesse, as a pair, is ultimately less interesting than the changes wrought in each of them as individuals after they separate. It helps that Ms. Jones and Mr. Samberg so compellingly sell post-breakup lives every bit as individually interesting as their chemistry together.

And, for all its power to subsume the self into a unit, love is hardly anything to celebrate; the true achievement, for Celeste and Jesse, is becoming oneself again in the face of a culture that prizes the sacrifice of the individual to an ideal. A film that starts with a breakup and moves toward, well, no resolution that’s traditionally satisfying, is a film that truly understands the sublime and painful comedy of having been in love.

CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER

Running Time 89 minutes

Written by Rashida Jones, Will McCormack

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger

Starring Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Elijah Wood

A. O. Scott: The Man, The Tumblr (Twitter)

Yesterday we wrote about the second-best movie critic fan Tumblr (besides F*ck Yeah, Rex Reed, of course): A.O. Scott Zingers. After noting that The New York Times' reviewer had only been quoted on the site twice this year, we sent a message to Mr. Scott on Twitter and asked what he thought of a whole Tumblr dedicated to his movie take-downs.

Imagine our surprise when we received not one but two responses from Mr. Scott regarding his fan page.

"Flattered and tickled!" The newspaper's chief film critic responded late yesterday evening, before following up with a quick, "tho when they don't update I worry that I've lost it."

We assuaged Mr. Scott's fears, as anyone who could write such a scathing take-down of Ted ("The sin...is not that it is offensive but that it is boring, lazy and wildly unoriginal") has obviously still got "it."

Jordan Gelber and Mia Farrow.

Todd Solondz is the sort of director beloved by fresh-faced film students when they first arrive at school—his films are superficially interesting for their shock value and their disconnect from reality coexisting with an insistence that this is how life really is. Once deep into the syllabus, though, the burgeoning filmmakers learn that these spectacles lack the control or craftsmanship that makes the movie-going experience so exciting. He’s in the sort of rut where fellow student favorite Wes Anderson was uncomfortably wedged before the release of the remarkable Moonrise Kingdom: each film a smeared carbon copy of the one just before, with an emphasis on aesthetics and not much more.

Mr. Solondz’s second film, Happiness, is still his best; it indulges in glum miserablism but still has compelling conflicts and a ’50s-melodrama directorial style that complements its ideas. Subsequent years brought a series of films in which Mr. Solondz intended to shock his audience with graphic sex or events and ideas that are outré for their own sake, as though the lesson he learned from Happiness was that making an audience uncomfortable is the ultimate goal. That’s why it’s a relief that Dark Horse, while bearing surface similarities to past Solondz films, begins on a dramatically different path. Like Happiness, the film begins with an uncomfortable meeting between a beautiful woman and a socially inept, unattractive man. Unlike Happiness, however, the first human interaction in Dark Horse doesn’t lead immediately to crushing unhappiness; the plot unfolds like a heightened version of life.

The socially inept man in question is the film’s protagonist, Abe (played by Jordan Gelber), whose attempts to seduce the lovely Miranda (Selma Blair) are off-putting and bizarre in a manner recognizable to anyone who’s ever reassured a friend going through a long dry spell. Abe calls Miranda late at night, when she’s zonked out on prescription drugs, and takes her attempts to end the call as an invitation to show up to her house with a bouquet of flowers. Their courtship unfolds like a silent comedy, with the ardency of Abe’s affection parried at every turn by Miranda’s pharmaceutical coyness. She’s probably into him—well, maybe; she doesn’t really have the capacity to respond to even the most quotidian of social cues, let alone the mania of Abe’s dating style.

One can’t fault Abe, really, for his inability to interact with people. The first third of the movie elucidates with great sympathy the reasons for his anxieties. Despite being long past the age at which he should have moved out, if his paunch and hairline are to be judged, Abe lives with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken) and works for his father. The rage festering inside Abe—at his parents, at his brother, at his loveless and lonely situation—explodes outward in one early instance when he cannot get a refund at a toy store. Leave aside for a moment what a tired cliché the adult action-figure enthusiast may be. The story of a life spent as a "dark horse," hoping for literally anything to change, comes across in a moment; the remainder of the movie would have to be brilliant to be necessary.

But with his screenwriting so able to convey a human story, and his actor so well chosen and so resourceful, Mr. Solondz still cannot resist the impulse to bury his film’s best elements under a thick layer of that old freshman surrealism. Abe’s confidant is but a manifestation of his conscience, or his alter personality, or the self-critical voice in his head: this much is never clear, but she appears constantly to hector him.

Dream sequences in films are very rarely useful; given that cinema is itself malleable enough to contain any experience the director wants to impose upon a character, why must we waste time seeing the character’s imagined experiences? Characters from the film appear like ghosts to torment Abe. The viewer knows with certainty that they are not there, and knows too that any chance of truly understanding Abe through his interactions with others has passed. There is not merely more satisfaction in watching the way Abe moves through the world; there’s unpleasant alienation in having the straightforwardness of Dark Horse snatched away in favor of an arch, overdetermined fantasy that proves only that life is brutal.

The film presents Abe with two variations on the same ending, one apparently real and one imagined. Neither of them provide Abe happiness, though one provides him the chance to think of himself as a doomed romantic idealist. His romance with Miranda is no romance at all, it turns out. This narrative turn is neutral vis-a-vis the film’s quality, but the manner in which it isn’t dealt with—after revealing a dangerous secret, Miranda just fades out of the narrative—is deflating. Shouldn’t Abe have fought for her, or fought with her?

While no one should expect a happy ending from a Todd Solondz movie, the film’s initial vigor and commitment to a muscular realism is exciting. However, the manner in which Dark Horse shifts back into the same fantastically unreal dourness is an unhappy ending indeed. While every director has his or her own style, Mr. Solondz’s has worn thin; his halfway realization that there are new ways he might tell stories is not enough to make Dark Horse the film it almost was.

Dark Horse

Running Time 85 minutes

Written and Directed by Todd Solondz

Starring Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair and Christopher Walken

Two out of four stars